Regular expression in find command in bash

Question

why 'save$' can not match the file named save?

root@debian:/home/tiger# ls /home/test
save
root@debian:/home/tiger# find /home/test -regex 'save$'
root@debian:/home/tiger# find /home/test -regex '.*save$'
/home/test/save

This question is about "software tools commonly used by programmers", so I think it should be reopened. — Walter Tross
– Walter Tross, Commented Sep 12, 2014 at 17:02
The question could be reworded like this: Why does find DIR -regex treat the regex as if it always had a leading ^ anchor and a trailing $ anchor? — Walter Tross
– Walter Tross, Commented Sep 12, 2014 at 17:13

Sivachandran · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-05 06:53:37Z

1

Because the regex is matched against the full path(i.e. /home/test/save) instead of just on the file name 'save'.

answered Oct 5, 2012 at 6:53

Sivachandran

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1 Comment

Walter Tross Over a year ago

usually you need the ^ and $ anchors to match on the whole string, and, as the example by the OP shows, the $ is allowed. But it's as if there were an implicit ^ too. The question remains: Why?

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